Dealing With Pornography and Internet Addiction

Finding answers to your questions can be the first step in helping your addicted spouse.

Brenda’s heart ached. Her husband, a youth pastor, had been arrested. The problem behind it all was even worse than the arrest itself — he had an uncontrollable sexual addiction.

Frank didn’t see it coming. His job kept him on the road a lot, but he thought his relationship with his wife — a Sunday school teacher — was fine. He didn’t know his wife’s casual conversations about religion in a Christian chat room had grown into an affair, until she announced she was leaving him.

For Brenda and for Frank, these situations were tragedies. They felt hurt, betrayed and helpless. Yet they made it. The good news is that today their relationships are restored and are continually improving. The process was difficult and required incredible patience and forgiveness on their part. It also required a lot of vulnerability and willingness to look at their own lives. Still, they’ll both tell you that their commitment to recovery paid off.

Are you facing a similar tragedy? Are you still in shock after finding a stash of online porn or hearing that your wife has lost her job for constantly violating company policies against personal Internet use?

Or are you just growing more and more concerned about where your spouse’s online habits are headed? Has your spouse’s daily online time grown from a few minutes into a few hours? Is he online later and later into the night? Is she increasingly irritable when you question her Internet use?

Whether your spouse is just starting to show signs of using the Internet too much or has allowed a habit to explode in some tragic way, I encourage you to fight for your relationship. You have every reason to care about the health of your marriage and to take appropriate steps to keep the Internet from driving a wedge between you and your spouse.

The tough challenge for you at this point is to direct your thoughts and emotions in a positive direction. That’s difficult when you feel hurt, anxious, and vulnerable. Dr. James Dobson addresses this struggle in his book, Love Must be Tough:

“As a love affair begins to deteriorate, the vulnerable partner is inclined to panic. Characteristic responses include grieving, lashing out, begging, pleading, grabbing and holding; or the reaction may be just the opposite, involving appeasement and passivity.” Dr. Dobson says such reactions are understandable but are not often successful in restoring the relationship. “In fact,” he says, “such reactions are usually counterproductive, destroying the relationship the threatened person is trying so desperately to preserve.”James C. Dobson, Love Must be Tough: Straight Talk (Nashville, Tenn.: Word, 1999), p. 30.

So what do you do? You start with prayer and follow with a day-to-day commitment to love your spouse the way God loves you. The purpose of this series of articles is to give you some general direction, to answer some of the questions that are likely to be going through your mind and to direct you to resources that can help you understand and address the struggle your marriage is facing.

Put the Pieces of Your Marriage Back Together

You may feel that there is no hope for your marriage and the hurt is too deep to restore the relationship and love that you once had. The truth is, your life and marriage can be better and stronger than it was before. In fact, thousands of marriages, situations as complex and painful as yours, have been transformed with the help of professionals who understand where you are right now and care deeply about you and your spouse’s future. You can restore and rebuild your marriage through a personalized, faith-based, intimate program called, Hope Restored.

The Daily Citizen from Focus on the Family exists to be your most trustworthy news source. Our team of analysts is devoted to giving you timely and relevant analysis of current events and cultural trends – all from a biblical worldview – so that you can be inspired and assured that the information you share with others comes from a reliable source.

Alive to Thrive is a biblical guide to preventing teen suicide. Anyone who interacts with teens can learn how to help prevent suicidal thinking through sound practical and clinical advice, and more importantly, biblical principles that will provide a young person with hope in Christ.

Every year on Bring Your Bible to School Day, students across the nation celebrate religious freedom and share God’s love with their friends. This event is designed to empower students to express their belief in the truth of God’s Word–and to do so in a respectful way that demonstrates the love of Christ.

Focus on the Family’s® Foster Care and Adoption program focuses on two main areas:

Wait No More events, which educate and empower families to help waiting kids in foster care

Post-placement resources for foster and adoptive families

Find Christian Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Psychologists, Social Workers and Psychiatrists near you! Search by location, name or specialty to find professionals in Focus on the Family’s Christian Counselors Network who are eager to assist you.

Through reviews, articles and discussions, Plugged In exists to shine a light on the world of popular entertainment while giving you and your family the essential tools you need to understand, navigate and impact the culture in which we live.

Have you been looking for a way to build your child’s faith in a fun and exciting way?Adventures in Odyssey® audio dramas will do just that. Through original audio stories brought to life by actors who make you feel like part of the experience; these fictional, character-building dramas use storytelling to teach lasting truths.

Focus on the Family’s Hope Restored all-inclusive intensives offer marriage counseling for couples who are facing an extreme crisis in their marriage, and who may even feel they are headed for divorce.